A new book co-authored by iSchool Adjunct Lecturer Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic, assistant professor of media studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, examines video file standards and the tensions that have emerged between the film industry and the archiving community that is tasked with preserving cultural cinematic productions.
The Future of Memory: A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving Image Archive, released this month by the University of Illinois Press, explores new lossless video file standards developed by the archival community that compete with technologies developed by film and broadcast industries that are often ill-suited to archives work.
"Film and video archivists have long used 'hand-me down' technologies developed by and for cinema and television producers … [but] they don't always serve the needs of media archives and archivists," explained Jones. "About a decade ago, a group of archivists decided to take existing technologies—Matroska and FFV1—and develop and standardize them as being 'by us, for us' standards for archivists. This break from tradition—and the inherent tensions between TV/film production ethics/mindsets and those of archivists—proved to be fertile ground for inquiry."
The result is a fascinating look at competing file types in a book that is part technology, part history, and part drama starring a cast of troublesome technological standards.
"One of the most interesting things for me about [this] work is realizing how fiercely people can align with particular standards technologies. Standards are things we don't usually think much about—they surround us and are the infrastructure of our lives. Most people don't think that much about the struggles and politics of, say, the MP4 video encoding," Jones said. "Believe it or not, people in the audiovisual archives and preservation worlds can get very emotional about the choices they make about something as seemingly invisible as video encoding and format standards."
Jones and Jancovic first met in 2019 at The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam where Jones was presenting his dissertation. They discovered that their two research paths dovetailed nicely and could be easily combined into one volume.
"We realized how interesting it could be to look at this cultural moment of lossless storage of time-based media both from an archives and a media theory perspective, so we decided to create a book that would blend our dissertations and, ultimately, become greater than the sum of its parts," said Jones.
This is Jones's first published book. His latest research examines the history and cultural impact of television horror hosts like Svengoolie, Joe Bob Briggs, Elvira, and others. For over two decades, Jones worked in libraries and archives in roles such as archivist, records manager, digital preservation specialist, and digital asset manager. Currently, Jones serves as manager of gifts documentation at the University of Illinois Foundation and an adjunct lecturer in the iSchool. He earned his master's and doctorate degrees in library and information science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.